LXXXIII

Don September 22nd, 2009

LXXXIII Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

            Far above the famous Tallulah Gorge, where the Tallulah River is a mere mountain creek, it runs through a clearing.  More than trees and brush came clear that day.  The epiphany seemed to demand a Hopkinsian sprung-rhythm sonnet of me, so that is what I tried to supply.  It appeared in New Oxford Review, November 1981.

 

 

INSCAPE: Or, the Idea of Order at Tallulah River

 

Sonnet XXVII

 

 

The swooping, soaring bat had no business to be

                                                Abroad so early, so fine a sun-filled day,

                                                But he was.  He stirred our pulse as he skirted the tree

                                                And, falcon-like, stooped on his unseen insect prey.

Around that tree like a shuttle he wove his way,

                                                Now fluttering lightness of leaf, now diving weight;

                                                The field became a stage for a mystery play,

                                                A loom for the warp and woof of insect fate.

Yet more than the doom of bugs he caught and ate

                                                Was at stake in that circle of sun in the shadowy hills:

                                                Could the terrible grace of his course such a vortex create,

                                                A confluence of circling harmonies, forces, wills?

His flight stirred the air like a word, a divine decree,

                                                And made the meadow a world with a still-point tree.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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